Thursday, April 26, 2007

I have posted some games featuring "Tango Tactics" arising out of the Black Knights Tango and related lines (including the Zurich Variation of the Nimzo-Indian). They make an excellent study aid for anyone trying to learn this line. You can also download the positions as a PDF file to print out and carry with you. In the positions above it is always Black to play and win, of course, by the quickest way possible. Additional games and puzzles are included in the links. For more info on the Tango, check out my 1...Nc6 bibliography.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

I played a cute game on ICC the other day -- a very satisfying attack, complete with a Queen sac finale. I think I used less than 90 seconds of my clock, too -- though I did have the advantage of my opponent's time....

Monday, April 16, 2007

There is an intriguing review of Garry Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess in this week's Times Literary Supplement titled "Garry Kasparov's Deadly Game" by Daniel Johnson. In some ways it is less a review than a reading between the lines to find an explanation for Kasparov's most dramatic life decision: to give up chess for the dangerous game of Russian politics. With his recent arrest (he was released after a $38 fine) and with Putin's approval ratings in the 70 percent range (well over twice those of Bush and Blair), you have to wonder about his chances for success. Yet, as Johnson concludes his review: "this coded manifesto of a book is only the latest sign that his courage at the chessboard has not deserted him in the political arena."

Friday, April 13, 2007

"The new and improved CJA Awards?" is the title of a recent post at the Boylstown Chess Club Weblog, which describes some of the changes to the annual awards from the Chess Journalists of America. Edward Winter once described the CJA as "a dazzlingly undemanding body with a track-record of dispensing hundreds of awards, often to self-nominees with no realistic hope of winning an accolade from elsewhere." To judge from the site awarded Best General Chess Website of 2004, which was the practically unreadable A.J.'s Chess Home Page (actually much improved over the past three years) you can see there is some validity to Winter's scathing remark.

The idea of an organization that recognizes the best in chess journalism is laudable, but the results have sometimes been laughable. As Winter suggests, self-nomination is at the root of the problem. You have to pay $15 to join CJA, which entitles you to one nomination, and then $8 per nomination thereafter. Obviously, the economics alone dictate that people join solely to nominate their own work. After all, why spend even $8 to nominate someone else's work, even if excellent-- especially when the writer of that piece might duplicate your effort, so that your money would merely enrich the CJA? You can see that the system has the insidious effect of making everyone more interested in their own recognition than the recognition of others--hence the inevitably insular nature of the CJA Awards. It's a vicious circle.

As Howard Goldowsky has argued for years, including in comments at the BCC Weblog, the CJA Awards should be run more like a literary prize where "any CJA member should be allowed to nominate multiple pieces of work for free, not just the one piece of work per entry fee, like the current rule" and have "nominations ... whittled to a shortlist...." As he goes on to say, until such changes are made, "winning a CJA award [will be] more like winning first place in the class C section rather than in the Open section." (You can read a more detailed presentation of Howard's views on page 7 of the June 2004 Chess Journalist).

The CJA awards are promoted in Chess Life as though they were central to helping to shape our judgment of American chess journalism, but the truth is they remain on the periphery of the field, of interest only to those who are themselves on the periphery of chess journalism -- especially that ever-growing legion of people, like myself, who keep amateur chess blogs. The bigger irony is that the CJA barely acknowledges the important work being done on the web by the very peripheral writers who seem to pay the most attention to the CJA awards.... Another vicious circle that needs fixing.

One reason for their failure to acknowledge the rise of chess blogs is that the CJA membership is still emerging from a print tradition and is still quite focused on print media. They have been late to embrace the web and still have only two main web categories ("Best General Chess Website" and "Best State Website"), though several categories are "web eligible."

As the BCC Weblog suggests, chess bloggers and webmasters really ought to make an effort this year to influence the future course of the organization by not only joining the organization but by putting up some good nominations in those "web eligible" categories. Like Howard Goldowsky, they should try to make change from within. And I would go so far as to suggest that they each also nominate someone laudable other than themselves. Think of it as your "free nominee" -- the one that comes with the $15 fee to join CJA.

I know that this year I intend to nominate ChessCafe for "Best General Chess Website," since they should probably receive the award for every year. Ironically, the site has never won. ChessCafe founder Hanon Russell did win the CJA's Chess Journalist of the Year prize in 2001, but his site has never been recognized -- likely because Russell has never seen a reason to bother entering. So my "free entry" (which comes with my $15 membership fee) will be as follows:

If more sites like ChessCafe win awards, maybe the CJA will gain sufficient legitimacy to make winning one of their awards worthwhile.... The only way to destroy a vicious circle is to reverse it.... Who knows: with some effort by the participants, maybe some day an award will actually mean something.

Friday, April 06, 2007

My apologies to anyone who came to the club to participate in the Five Minute Tournament that was listed on our club calendar. I had not been attending regularly and was surprised to learn that the Kenilworth Chess Club Championship under-1800 event is still going on, and not expected to conclude until the end of the month, making a blitz event impossible. I will try to arrange a make-up event for early May, to coincide with the awards ceremony for the championship.

Meanwhile, there were lots of casual blitz games at the club last night.

I played an interesting game that featured an unusual treatment of the Caveman Caro-Kann by Black (and one not covered in my article). It was my only win in many tries against recent Westfield CC Blitz champion NM Mark Kernighan. The game began 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.e5 Bf5 4.h4 Qc8!? (not a completely new move, but Mark has a novel idea) 5.c4 dxc4!? 6.Bxc4 Be6!? Unfortunately for Mark, the Caveman lived up to its name and he ended up getting clobbered (see diagram above).

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

The Rutgers University women's basketball team plays tonight in the NCAA championship game. It has generated a lot of excitement on campus, as you might imagine, and will probably get me seated in front of the ESPN at 8:30 p.m. tonight.

The news coverage of the game is already focusing on the two coaches, Vivian Stringer of Rutgers and Pat Summit of Tennessee, who are among the best in women's team sports. According to Stringer (and here is the chess angle):

"It probably is a chess match. She has her pieces, and I have my pieces, and we're trying to, at the right time, make the move. There will be moves and countermoves. ... Basketball is a game of chess. You just don't throw it out there randomly hoping and reacting. You hope to make a move and cause someone to else to react -- you look at the players you put in, and you consider what you need to do with that."